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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf. 1882-1941. Biography. Born: Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, brought up and educated at home. 1895,she had the first of numerous nervous breakdowns. following the death of her mother

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Virginia Woolf

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  1. Virginia Woolf 1882-1941

  2. Biography • Born: Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, • brought up and educated at home. • 1895,she had the first of numerous nervous breakdowns. • following the death of her mother • later claimed to have been frequently molested by Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother, • suffered psychologically from the experience. • in 1904, she moved with her sister, Vanessa, and two brothers to a house in Bloomsbury. • Following the death of her father (Sir Leslie Stephen, an editor and literary critic)

  3. Bio - continued • 1905: began writing professionally • initially for the Times Literary Supplement. • In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, • a civil servant and political theorist. • 1915: first novel, The Voyage Out, was published. • Her novels are considered revolutionary and pioneered literary modernism. • Late 1920’s • Began an affair with writer Vita Sackville-West

  4. Bio – part 3 • considered a leading modernist • one of the greatest innovators in the English language. • experimented with: • stream-of-consciousness, • underlying psychological /emotional motives of characters • fractured narrative and chronology. • Impact is still felt today.

  5. Bio – part 4 • 1941: committed suicide, by drowning herself near her home in Rodmell. • She filled her pockets with stones • jumped into the Ouse River. • left a suicide note: • "I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan't recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer."

  6. Literary Style Part II:

  7. Literary Style • “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. . . . Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness,” - Virginia Woolf in “Modern Fiction” .

  8. Depict Life as “Actually Experienced”

  9. Woolf’s writing attempts to capture the fragmented, spontaneous richness of life as perceived through the human mind. • Conventional narrative form: • could not do justice to the tumultuous randomness of modern existence, • Woolf experimented with methods that would convey: • momentary sensations • discontinuities of human consciousness. • The self: • was not something circumscribed by objects and linear narratives, • perceived only in flashes. • By allowing the boundaries of the self to crumble, by leaving oneself open to “exceptional moments” or “sudden shocks” of insight, • one may experience “a peculiar horror and a physical collapse” as the self dissolves, but also “ecstasy” and “rapture”.

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